Writing As Erotic Practice

Can writing be a tool to unlock more erotic freedom and possibility? How does reading erotica help us discover what is possible for our own sex lives? In this interview, writer and writing workshop facilitator Jen Cross shares what she has learned from over 20 years guiding others in tapping into the power of writing as a creative and generative practice. This interview is for everyone – whether or not you identify as a writer, whether or not you identify as a survivor of sexual trauma. Part 2 of the interview dives deeper into writing as a practice for working with sexual trauma, and can be found in our new Survivor’s Toolkit, a free online resource for all survivors of sexual trauma. Check out Jen Cross’ book Writing Ourselves Whole: Using The Power Of Your Own Creativity To Recover And Heal From Sexual Trauma Learn more about the Writing Ourselves Whole writing workshops and other offerings here. Jen Cross on the power of writing about sex : excerpt from Writing Ourselves Whole An excerpt from “writing the delicious stories” in Writing Ourselves Whole: Using the Power of Your Own Creativity to Recover and Heal from Sexual Trauma (Mango, 2017) When I started writing on my own, when I was coming out as both an incest survivor and a queer woman, I did a lot of writing about sex. (A lot of writing about sex.) Not quite ten years later, when I started leading writing groups with other trauma survivors, I was still curious about how we found words for our want: What stories do we tell about our desire, about what was ok to long for and what wasn’t? What did it mean, what did we mean, as survivors of sexual trauma who wanted to have good sex? My initial impetus for the erotic writing groups for sexual trauma survivors was to create a space where survivors of sexual violence could express their full, lived, complicated, and consensual sexuality—a sexuality that was, explicitly, at the intersection of trauma and desire. This would be a space where we could acknowledge the trauma embedded in our sex, even if we never wrote about the trauma/violence itself. These were groups where we wrote sexual fantasy about fictional characters and read them aloud to people who understood how dangerous and revolutionary it was for us to entertain the idea of a fun or silly or “light” sexual fantasy. What did we think we were doing, sitting in molded plastic chairs in a room with painted concrete walls and writing in public about having sex? Didn’t we know it would be safer to keep these things quiet, to put them still unworded back in our bodies? During those eight weeks of my first writing group, in the summer of 2002, something in each of us writers softened, as, week after week, we allowed ourselves to risk writing what we really wanted, out of our particular healing and desiring humanity. In these groups, our definition of “erotic” was expansive, after Audre Lorde’s definition in her essay “Uses of the Erotic”: the erotic as a site of our grounded and embodied power, our profound creative fullness. When we write from that place, we write from and with our breath, our bodies, our whole human experience. Each word passed through our musculature, our bones, our veins, from head through body to page. Through this writing, we practiced trust for and gratitude toward our bodies. We restoryed an eros that had been desecrated. Then something surprising happened: the women I wrote with began to write about desires other than sex. Each of us in that room wanted more,